Thursday, June 5, 2008

All In Good Time


I was on the road to cockiness with respect to the analytical skills of The Goose, my five year old. Sometimes in the evening when I am working around the kitchen preparing dinner, she will get her “math game”. Her math game consists of plastic cups that once held yogurt and a pile of colored Popsicle sticks; the kind you buy at the dollar store for craft projects. She lines her math game up in front of her at her place at the table and awaits my quiz questions. I ask her “what is nine divided by three?” and she will count out nine Popsicle sticks and line up three yogurt cups then systematically distribute the nine sticks into the three cups and come up with the correct answer.

Surely this is very advanced for a five year old who has not yet started Kindergarten. Oh yes my daughter has a gift for analytical thinking. Math and science are her strengths. I am full of pride. My daughter takes after me. Before I became a stay at home mom I worked in a research lab performing experiments on the cellular and molecular level. She’s going to be a scientist just like her mom! Yes sir she a chip off the old block. I’m puffed up and full of pride.

Yesterday, when I went to The Goose’s pre-school to pick her up at the end of the school day she was wearing a necklace made from colorful plastic beads and wire. She was very proud of the necklace and I commented on how beautiful it was and asked her if she had made it all by herself. She assured me she had made it all by her self and it took her all morning. She told me it was very hard work and she tried to count all the beads on the necklace once she finished it but there were more than one hundred beads and she couldn’t count that high. I asked her how high she was able to count before she had to quit. She reported that she had counted as high as one trillion sixty eight but then she had to stop.

Well, maybe there are a few things she has to learn before she fills out the application to MIT. I’m walking around with a little less puff.












2 comments:

Jeffrey Goble said...

Hey. One trillion sixty-eight is pretty high.
Puff away.

Nick McGivney said...

Aw, that road to cockiness is ok to travel once in a while. It's less the road and more the walk that gives us away, I think. And El Bog (maybe I have it bass ackward, but is that Spanish for Marsh, Jeff?) is completely right. Dream trillionaire dreams, Yankee.

n